“It concerns us to know the purposes we seek in life, for then, like archers aiming at a definite mark, we shall be more likely to attain what we want.” –Aristotle

The bow and arrow is perhaps one of the oldest surviving links to our earliest ancestors. In fact, evidence suggests that it might have been invented as early as 50,000 BC. It was, in its time, a weapon of mass destruction, as well as the means to hunt food and protect one’s family. The ability to wield a bow and arrow was shared by people across the planet throughout time, and remains to this day, an elegant symbol of the past.

Archery was part of the Olympic games as early as 1900 and right from the start, it was a sport that welcomed women. Archery’s presence at the Games came and went, and after a 50-year absence, reappeared for good at the 1972 Olympics.

For world-class archer and this year’s Distinguished Old Girl, Joan GALLIE McDonald ’62, the bow and arrow came into her life at summer camp. Not one for the whole “arts and crafts” camp scene, Ms. McDonald, a fervent athlete, sought the sports offerings and came across archery. Or perhaps archery came across her. In any event, it was a marriage made in heaven. Tassles were handed out as young archers passed successfully through all the stages and by age 16, Joan had earned her first gold.

Ms. McDonald was born in Toronto and raised in Lynn Lake, Manitoba, a mining town 800 miles north of Winnipeg, population 500. Her father, who was a mining engineer, shared her perfectionist tendencies or, as she puts it, ‘obsessiveness’. He imbued in her a desire to do things the right way and to perform with precision, not a bad combination for a future archer. Her mother, a strong, competent woman, took care of the home, which included home-schooling her three daughters and managing the radio for the community that connected the tiny enclave to the outside world where groceries came over the ice once a year.

In Grade 6, Ms. McDonald was sent out of the remote town to the more congenial environs of Balmoral Hall in Winnipeg. Here, sports were highly prized and Ms. McDonald, who marvels that her parents might have detected these leanings in her, found herself in the kind of atmosphere that fed her predilection for athletics. Academics weren’t the first thing on her mind, but ever the practical one, she knew she had to maintain a 70% average to enjoy the privilege of playing sports, so she maintained a 70.1% average, and played basketball.

Her family moved to Toronto in 1958 when she attended BSS. At the time, BSS did not offer the range of sports and athletics it has now, and the absence of it drove home how much Ms. McDonald needed sport in her life. The swimming pool became her athletic haven and she played basketball, even though at the time it was ‘girls’ rules basketball’ which meant covering only two thirds of the court, an affront to her ‘do it right’ mentality. Her parents also found an archery school nearby and took her there two nights a week, allowing her to keep up with what she’d learned at camp.

While attending two all-girls’ schools in the 1950s and 60s, Ms. McDonald observes with the benefit of hindsight, that even though feminism was still a distance from becoming part of the public consciousness, and even though the BSS basketball rules dictated playing only two thirds of the court, and Balmoral Hall was teaching girls how to iron men’s shirts in Home Economics, Joan McDonald and many girls like her, had begun questioning these assigned roles for women. In these schools, they could find their voices in an environment that gave girls freedom to excel and express themselves. When asked if her rejection of these stereotypes for women (she refused to iron the shirts), was enabled by the all-girls environment, her response was, “I’m sure of it.”

Describing her childhood in Lynn Lake, Ms. McDonald reveals the origins of her strong, independent nature. “We spent hours in the bush, and learned to look after ourselves in that environment. We were on the tree line and the high winds in winter would harden the surface of the snow. Ptarmigans, snowbirds, get trapped underneath and you could hear them flapping, trying to get out. My sister and I regarded it as our raison d’etre to rescue the Ptarmigan. If there was a storm, we’d wait for it to stop so we could go out and rescue the birds.”
Now, you can’t take a girl who had grown up rescuing Ptarmigan under tundra and expect she’ll be content ironing men’s shirts.

After graduating from BSS, Ms. McDonald spent a restless year travelling and trying to figure out her future. All the while, she kept up with archery. With several competition wins, she knew she was good, but the sport hadn’t yet become her passion. Everything changed after she broke the Canadian record at the 1962 Canadian Championships in Vancouver. She finally fell in love with archery, her greatest passion to this day.

But given the tenor of the times, she followed the expected course for women and took a job in the secretarial pool, or ‘ghetto’ as she calls it, with the anachronistically named temp agency, Manpower. In this way, she could arrange not to work in the summer when she needed to compete.

She also married her long-time boyfriend from their BSS/UCC days and settled into the role of wife and mother of two boys, David and Christopher. She’d kept up with archery but mostly as a hobby while she busied herself with the domestic duties that defined the role of wife in the 1960s. However, the rosy picture ended with the demise of her marriage and the desertion of her husband, leaving her with the responsibility of raising two sons on her own. Partly for her own sanity and partly because her passion for archery could no longer be ignored, she returned to shooting and tried to figure out a way to survive.

“I cannot, in hindsight, figure out how we survived. We were beyond poor. I was terrified because in those days, [1973], there was no hope for kids from divorced families, according to all the literature.”

Ms. McDonald tried everything possible to stay home with the boys. But she needed money. She struck a deal with a figure skating coach to provide room and board for skaters who were coming in from all over Canada to train. They would help with the kids at night, and she could go out and work.

According to Joan, “archery saved my soul” during those rough and tumble times. She and her sons created a practice target inside their house, where the arrow would start at the kitchen and pass through the dining room, giving her a seven metre shot. Mercifully, no one strayed in the path of the arrow during practice time.

When archery had returned to the Olympics in 1972, she had just given birth to David. In 1976, she went to the Games as an alternate, claiming that she didn’t make the team because she ‘wanted it too much’. “It’s a mental game,” she explains. “My head was focusing on outcome and not process. Everything you do in your life is process.” This is a theme that pervades Ms. McDonald’s approach to winning and what she tries to impart to her students as the mindset you need to succeed.

In the intervening years leading up to the 1980 Games, Ms. McDonald would practice like a Trojan, and her boys would be right at her side as she prepared for her big moment. She was at the top of her form and proud to be representing Canada as the Olympic archery team was assembled, and she a star on it.

Her dreams of winning gold as a world-class archer were dashed when the Canadian team, along with 64 other countries, boycotted the Games in 1980. Politics and public opinion conspired to use the Olympics as the territory on which to protest the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. Countless athletes’ hopes were extinguished along with Joan Macdonald’s only opportunity to compete at this level.

Athletes devote their lives to their sport, undergoing grueling training regimes and a single-minded focus that engulfs them in the lead up to the Games. One could not imagine how it must feel to have the Olympics in sight and then pulled out from under you. “It’s something you never get over,” says Ms. McDonald.

She didn’t make the team in 1984. As she explains, “it wasn’t that I was getting poorer, but the others were getting better.” After this experience, she made the decision to retire from competitive sport. But Olympic dreams still haunted her and as she watched the Canadian Olympic team go off to Seoul in 1988, she thought, “How am I ever going to get there?”
Her solution was to turn her talents to helping others. She began by creating a much-needed practice centre for archers. Then, in 1990, she spotted a teenaged boy at a tournament who had, “$5,000 worth of equipment and 10 cents’ worth of technique.” But there was something about him and soon, they began working together. Rob Rusnov opted to stay with Ms. McDonald to continue his training rather than go away to university, and with that, she officially became a coach. In 1996 they went to the Olympics together.

“We weren’t prepared,” she says of that experience. “The Olympics are an animal like no other. Until you’ve done it, you can’t know. We knew we had to be better. We had been waiting, relying on the ‘system’ to help us, and there isn’t one.” And though Rob Rusnov didn’t win in 1996, the journey cemented for both of them, a lifelong friendship, and confirmed her passion for coaching.
She is now the personal coach for more than 30 archers. Since 1999, Ms. McDonald’s archers have consistently held top spots in Canada and internationally. She has been head coach at three more Olympic Games and six World Target Championships. As the Federation of Canadian Archers Ontario Regional Coach, she also trains the trainers in preparation for head coach positions with various teams. And she has returned to BSS to coach girls who want to learn archery, providing for them not only lessons in technique, but lessons in life.

“Can’t is a big word. Get rid of it. If you don’t believe in yourself, the word ‘can’t’ will win. The most important thing is being aware of how you feel, honouring that, and believing in your ability to succeed.”

Joan McDonald might not have won gold at the Olympics, but she has grappled with loss and disappointment, got back up, and found a way to keep moving forward. More remarkably, she found a way to pursue her passion while giving back to her community and helping young people achieve their dreams. If the Olympics were handing out medals for resilience, spirit and compassion, there is no doubt Joan McDonald would win gold.

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